My thoughts in e-text

So what more can I do with my adsense account? How about video ads? Why not. What are they? How do they work? Here is my first experiment with video ads. The setup was pretty simple. You click on Google AdSense Video units link and you are connected to your youtube account. Once you log in to youtube and verify your information you can start off with creating a player with the contect you want to show based on keywords or channels or category. Simple :-). The videos can also be generated based on the performance and characteristics of the website they are placed in. You get a piece of code that you embedded in your blog/webpage. Here is the piece of code that I got for keywords "phone". Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com Update 1: Hmm for some reason that did not work. I will give it a try again later. Update 2: I found out the problem. It seems for some reason when I copy paste the code somehow double quotes get added at the wrong places. And so the link did not work. ...

Working in Google and not having an AdSense account is not cool. So I created an account and added the AdSense page element. Looks good. Although I did not like the layout. May be I should move to a new template that will have 3 columns. One on the left with profile, one on the right with ads and middle with the blog. May be I will write one. Anyway with the ads in place I can track how many page impressions I got on my blog ;-). Actually I should find out how to track traffic to my blog. Let me add that to my list of To Dos. Talking of To Dos I was also researching for some "Getting Things Done" (GTD) applications that will make me more organized. Lucky for me an article got published in Toms Hardware about the very topic . In it the author writes his views on various Getting Things Done With Software . After reading through the article quickly I found HiveMinder to be the most useful for me. I tried Personal Tracks too, but I guess HiveMinder is easier to work with. It ha...

I have a rather busy schedule like most people and from time to time I wish I had more time. Well I lied. I don't wish from time to time, I actually always wish there was more time. There is always something more to be done. Yet here we are constrained only by time. The list of things to do is ever growing. 1. I have to finish reading several of my magazines that appear at my doorstep every month. I subscribe to Dr. Dobbs, Wired and Electronics for you. But I did not have time in 2007 to complete any of the magazines in 2007. So now I am reading all the old backlogs. I have to come up to speed to open my new Feb 2008 issues. I am now at March 2007 issue. I have exactly 1 year's worth of 3 magazines, bringing the total to a hefty 36 magazines. 2. Then I have to work on that media player using Freevo or Pigment or what ever I decide. And then there is the matter of figuring out which one to use. Huh, will I ever be able to decide and start getting my hands dirty? 3. I still have...

After thinking about the pros and cons of using kaa.canvas I am just now thinking may be I should simply go with pigment. The reason is I am looking for a way to scale a screen of information (graphically) and I guess kaa.canvas may not be able to do that. I did not yet discover all the available features in it, but that is what my initial impressions are. I will go over the kaa code base and see if I can scale screens with images and text on the fly (as in animation). If not then perhaps pigment has some tricks in the bag.

If you are ever configuring an app and see the message "gtkdocize not found" in Gentoo, then you need to emerge gtk-doc. I had some hard time figuring this out so I am writing it in my blog for the next time. When I saw that error message I did an "emerge -s gtkdocize". Usually it is that simple in Gentoo. But not this time. The emerge command returned no results at all. Then I searched for gtkdoc and still no luck. After searching in Google, I still did not have a solution. After thinking for a while I decided to try to search for gtk-doc. Bingo! That worked! Interestingly, this is my first post from my Virtual machine :-)

I got everything working from with in virtual box, except for the additions. I was able to run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run (from the Guest additions iso) and it ran to completion without producing any errors. It compiled some modules and modified my xorg.conf file. But there were several problems with the additions. First the script changed the video device driver from vesa to vboxvideo which gets me a maximum resolution of 1024x768. All other higher resolutions complained about "vrefresh out of range" or "hsync out of range". I do not understand how that can be given that I gave a wide range of hsync and vrefresh for my monitor. Finding little help from /var/log/Xorg.0.log, I decided to go back to my old vesa driver which at least gives be a slightly higher resolution of 1152x864. I was wishing the vbox driver could give me 1440x900 but that did not happen. Setting modelines also did not help so I gave up pretty quickly. My next issue is that I am not able to mount my s...

In one of my previous posts I expressed my excitement about VirtualBox beta 3 working well on Leopard. I benchmarked VirtualBox and found out that the guest OS runs almost at the native speed. This is very exciting. It simply means I can install Gentoo instead of Ubuntu or knoppix. It is not like I have anything against those distros. They are really good and get things done pretty fast. But I got used to Gentoo and learned so much about it that I know where to look for when something fails or if I wanted to install a package or hack something up quickly. I did not want to learn another distro from the basics. Anyway I created a new VM for Gentoo mounted the minimal install cd and launched the VM. Everything worked perfectly. I just followed the regular gentoo install procedure and I have a system up and running in about the same time as it would take for me to install on a native platform. I later installed kde and firefox. To start off working on my Freevo 2.0 project I downloaded th...

My gaming PC which also doubles as a media center is now completed. Well actually I finished working on it last weekend. I also started playing all the games I love playing. Unfortunately I became sick after the weekend and I could not blog about it. However I will try to blog the complete details this weekend (time permitting). There is one interesting twist to my plan. My PC uses linux for media center tasks and uses windows XP for playing games. Yeah I know I said I will linux for both but it so happens that wine seems to have some problems with the games I play. The games usually launch but with some tweaks. Even then I am not able to get the maximum performance from my GPU. For the $240 I would like to see all settings high and at least 30 FPS at 1280x720. More on how and why I had to switch in my next blog. I am still kind of sick and getting well. Hopefully this weekend finds me in a better state.

So finally, finally, finally I am so excited that VirtualBox works on my macbook pro. I felt really frustrated with the speed of Q today. I was trying to install some packages while compiling evas in kubuntu inside Q but it was so very slow. I can hardly switch apps. I don't know why but I just felt may be there is a new version of VirtualBox that will run on mac. Don't know why, I just had the feelings and lo and behold, there it is -- a new announcement on VirtualBox webpage about a new Beta 3 release for mac. Am I excited! I knew it would work on my Mac Leopard because why else would they release it? I started downloading the new package even before reading the news on the site. While the app was downloading I went ahead and read the complete details and I could feel the happiness inside when I read this sentence from the news "The new version sports seamless guest support and live dock tiles as well as numerous improvements and bug fixes. It goes without saying that it...

Today must be my lucky day. I finally got my GPU the great 8800 GT 512MB (G92). I will setup my PC tomorrow and see how things go. I will update my blog with photos and more details. So look out...